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[Solara]

If the game requires you to have more fertilizer, then it should require you to have more than potash. There's a lot more to soil than just nitrogen; saying that you can grow mushrooms in potash is like saying that a person can live off of Vitamin C tablets. It just doesn't make any sense.


Allowing dwarves to fertilize fields by composting arbitrary organic matter is great, but the purpose of doing this is very, very distinct from the purpose of potash. They're not remotely the same thing. The only reason it seems that way right now is because potash is the only way to improve your farming output.

I get all that, but like I said in my original post, I was just listing a few simple balance ideas, not necessarily what I think of as ideal ones. Potash is already in the game, and if default crop yields can be scaled back enough to make it useful, why not use it? Forget the cloth and leather entirely, if that's the problem - it was just a random idea that I thought went along with being able to recycle other useless crap like old furniture.

Under the changes I proposed I imagine I would rarely use fertilizer anyway, I'd rather just plant bigger fields and recruit more farmers. With potash that doesn't necessarily waste trees and the extra seed output though, it'd be easily possible for people who don't care for more difficulty in farming to still have the same amount of food as before, with trivial extra effort. (burning stuff and cooking seeds)       

[Twiggie]

sorry, didnt read the entire thread because its 1am and im tired.

would it not be better to have a yearly crop cycle? in which production is high, but if you miss the planting, harvesting etc then you're screwed. that would mean you'd have to scavenge wild plants and hunt for the first summer, and survive off what you'd brought in the wagon. however, it would only be labour intensive at planting and harvesting - the rest of the year two farmers could tend the plants just fine. that'd make harvesting a fortress-wide endeavour that you can't afford to screw up badly, or you'll be forced into your emergency stocks and begin to starve.

hey, losing is fun!

[CobaltKobold]

Way too detailed

Too Detailed for Dwarf Fortress? 

[Solara]

Too Detailed for Dwarf Fortress? 

Just because Toady One has the desire to simulate every. single. thing. doesn't necessarily mean we should encourage him.

That's why I pretty much never post anything here in Suggestions, the last thing I would want to do is give him an idea that might turn into a fifty page bloat and delay something else.

[G-Flex]

sorry, didnt read the entire thread because its 1am and im tired.

would it not be better to have a yearly crop cycle? in which production is high, but if you miss the planting, harvesting etc then you're screwed. that would mean you'd have to scavenge wild plants and hunt for the first summer, and survive off what you'd brought in the wagon. however, it would only be labour intensive at planting and harvesting - the rest of the year two farmers could tend the plants just fine. that'd make harvesting a fortress-wide endeavour that you can't afford to screw up badly, or you'll be forced into your emergency stocks and begin to starve.

hey, losing is fun!

This makes sense, as long as it's not TOO harsh, and the player has the opportunity to stockpile enough food beforehand.

This brings up a couple more points I thought of, the first of which is related:

• Underground farming perhaps could be differentiated from aboveground farming in that it's actually faster. It might not produce as much food per-year, or as much value, and might be more difficult, but individual harvests should perhaps take less time (1 or maybe 2 seasons). Why? Because it's just a bit of flavor to distinguish the two different types of farming further. I got the idea because, in my mind, dwarven farming is mostly fungal, and fungi have a tendency to grow pretty fast, monopolizing on the available nutrition and moisture as quickly as possible. This is hardly a necessary suggestion, but would be interesting.
• If underground farming IS substantially finicky/difficult compared to above-ground farming, dwarves would need to rely on other sources of food more, as I've said. They'd also have more reason to want to preserve food. This ties neatly into what I was saying earlier about fermentation: I believe it's used as a food preservation method as well as simple preparation.
  
  Of course, there's a counterpoint to this: Underground farming is likely to be more year-round than aboveground farming, meaning they have less need to store food for the winter, so maybe they don't have to rely on preservation more than humans, or at least would have to rely on it in different ways, for different reasons.

[CobaltKobold]

and delay something else.

Sorry, but all such items have opportunity cost.

[Draco18s]

and delay something else.

Sorry, but all such items have opportunity cost.

Reminds me of a game called Race for the Galaxy.  That is one of the most basic game mechanics they created:

Cards in hand are money.
Individual cards are possible advancement opportunities.
You forgo some opportunities to advance others.

So while some of those opportunities aren't helpful, they're still things you could have done (say, retaining a card that an opponent could use, and might come into possession of later, or 'spending' it to play a card to further your own goals because you don't have enough other cards in hand to pay for it--or forgo another desired advancement in order to retain that valuable-to-him card).

Advancing in one direction precludes advancing elsewhere is a rule of life.

[Silverionmox]

Way too detailed, I like that you have pH, Nitrogen, phosphates, and other minerals, but that produces a 3 or 4 dimensional zone of "good" which is hard for the player to keep track of.  Personally I think it just needs two of those: pH and N or P and N.

As I mentioned: it's a maximum program. Most of the dimensions work like an extra restriction, and can be switched off by the player without upsetting the system as a whole.

Since the post is three screens long and quickly went to the previous thread page, I'm going to put a little tl;dr here.
Plants need:
1. Air: Assumed present. Ignored.
2. Energy: plants get it according to their tag (light, decaying matter, heat, ...)
3. Water: plants use 1/7 in each growth step. Channels moisturize soil 7 squares far.
4a. Soil type: plants are tagged with soil types they grow on.
4b. pH: plants are tagged with tolerance ranges. Biomes have a standard pH, some fertilizer and plants modify it.
5. Heat: plants are tagged with tolerance ranges, and get bonus energy in the stimulating range
6. Nutrients: Plants extract nutrients and energy from their environs, and store them inside themselves.
7. Growing: plants grow to their next level every x frames, if nutrients are available. If not, they try again later. If they lack energy, they lose a growth level. Order and type of growth (leaves, fruit, etc.) determined in a tag.
8. Managing: use plant zones to give orders, either scheduled or on demand.
9. Tracking food value: The nutrients are tracked downstream in every organic substance, automatically generating the right fertilizer value for dead stuff.
10. Balance: Intended as maximum complexity, parts can be switched off easily.

[G-Flex]

"Some of it's optional!" is a really bad excuse for not designing the system well to begin with.

The system should not be made far more complex than it needs to be regardless of whether or not those parts can be turned off in the init file or what-have-you. "It's optional!" is just an excuse to get around discussing whether or not something is actually a good idea.

[Nikov]

Soil type isn't actually a direct factor in plant growth; you can grow a bean sprout in styrofoam beads with a little plant food water. The real effect it has is how it retains water or minerals. I'm not a 100% on how it works, but I beleive clay retains moisture to a muddy, root-rotting fault, sand drains too easily and retains few minerals, and loam is generally prized although rather uncommon.

pH is weird. I originally wanted to write it off as unimportant, but apparently its fluctuation determines the availibility and uptake of minerals into the soil. Basic soils uptake more minerals while acidic soils release more minerals to the plant. Most plants grow best in neutral or slightly acidic soil, but slowly would depete the soil of minerals unless the land were switched back over to laying fallow (neutralizing effect) or growing pH-raising crops. In extreme cases, lime can be spread on the soil to bring it back to workability. Directly inputting more minerals through conventional fertilizer (for this end I suggest chunks be processable into fertilizer, we've nothing better to do with them) one can also raise the mineral content. So really it seems the only thing the plants should check is the mineral content of the soil; season by season, this will fluctuate based on the soil pH.

One problem though; you can just grow cotton or what have you five straight years, ruin your soil, and then destroy the plot to rebuild it right over the same spot. No mechanic retains the quality of soil at all. This fact leads me to believe we really can't impliment soil fertility monitering; the soil can't get worse than the default, ever, because the player would then simply reset the field. I think fertility should be done based on soil type then; Loam, Clay, and lastly Sand, making good farmland a premium you couldn't cheat your way out of. Also it reduces the number of variables we'd have to track. Simply make sure you reward the player for a year if one season the field is let alone and fertilized, and we have a workable fertilizing/crop rotating system.

I'm not well rested and can barely think with all this Kraftwerk playing in the background, so just mull that though. Also refer to my previous post; I'm not seeing it discussed much but none of the suggestions really contradict it. I'll consider revising it after some sleep.

Radioaktivitat... Radioaktivitat...

[Silverionmox]

"Some of it's optional!" is a really bad excuse for not designing the system well to begin with.

The system should not be made far more complex than it needs to be regardless of whether or not those parts can be turned off in the init file or what-have-you. "It's optional!" is just an excuse to get around discussing whether or not something is actually a good idea.

I explicitly mentioned that because there was some knee-jerking upthread in the face of suggestions that added any complexity at all. It's three pages long after all, and I'd rather get responses that indicate what parts people don't care for rather than dismissing it as a whole. That being said, I don't think that any of the parts would make farming incomprehensibly complicated, just more varied.

Soil type isn't actually a direct factor in plant growth; you can grow a bean sprout in styrofoam beads with a little plant food water. The real effect it has is how it retains water or minerals. I'm not a 100% on how it works, but I beleive clay retains moisture to a muddy, root-rotting fault, sand drains too easily and retains few minerals, and loam is generally prized although rather uncommon.

They're all just names for particle sizes. The main function of soil type requirement is to add regional variety in the vanilla game and leaving the option open to mod in weird soil types with very specific vegetation (eg. trees that have gold apples or skulls as fruits and only grow behind those mountains, etc.).

pH is weird. I originally wanted to write it off as unimportant, but apparently its fluctuation determines the availibility and uptake of minerals into the soil. Basic soils uptake more minerals while acidic soils release more minerals to the plant. Most plants grow best in neutral or slightly acidic soil, but slowly would depete the soil of minerals unless the land were switched back over to laying fallow (neutralizing effect) or growing pH-raising crops. In extreme cases, lime can be spread on the soil to bring it back to workability. Directly inputting more minerals through conventional fertilizer (for this end I suggest chunks be processable into fertilizer, we've nothing better to do with them) one can also raise the mineral content. So really it seems the only thing the plants should check is the mineral content of the soil; season by season, this will fluctuate based on the soil pH.

To simplify that, I just added a penalty for inappropriate pH. Specific plants acidify the soil, specific minerals cures that. It wouldn't normally be an issue unless the player started to cultivate such plants very intensively, in which case he's asking for a challenge.

One problem though; you can just grow cotton or what have you five straight years, ruin your soil, and then destroy the plot to rebuild it right over the same spot. No mechanic retains the quality of soil at all. This fact leads me to believe we really can't impliment soil fertility monitering; the soil can't get worse than the default, ever, because the player would then simply reset the field. I think fertility should be done based on soil type then; Loam, Clay, and lastly Sand, making good farmland a premium you couldn't cheat your way out of. Also it reduces the number of variables we'd have to track. Simply make sure you reward the player for a year if one season the field is let alone and fertilized, and we have a workable fertilizing/crop rotating system.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but the one-piece farm plot is gone. Plant zones allow to issue or schedule orders to groups of squares. Information is stored in the squares. You could build a wall in the middle of a plot halfway summer, and the farming just goes on, except for the fact that your wall will flatten any existing crops of course.

I took your other post into account. Scheduling a fallow period or just doing nothing will slowly restore nutrients. How precise the scheduling will be is TBD. Seasonal, monthly, weekly.. The command schedule doesn't need to use the same rhytm as the ones the plants grow on. I like to give plants their own growing speed, that way you can have magical beanstalks etc. that grow while you watch. Indicating how well the plants will grow before you plant them is an interface must, of course. Depending on the most skilled farmer, that indication could go from possible/impossible for a dabbler to a summary of the estimated needs and yields of the plant for a legendary planter.

[G-Flex]

Having to store information on the soil tiles themselves would be nice, but I'm not sure how much of a memory hog it would be. I'm thinking a minimum of a few bytes per floor tile, so maybe not THAT bad, since it wouldn't really have to be accessed unless things are getting grown or fertilized.

Oh, by the way, you have one of Nikov's quotes marked as mine up there.

[Footkerchief]

Having to store information on the soil tiles themselves would be nice, but I'm not sure how much of a memory hog it would be. I'm thinking a minimum of a few bytes per floor tile, so maybe not THAT bad, since it wouldn't really have to be accessed unless things are getting grown or fertilized.

Toady already offloaded map spatters (pools of blood, snow, etc.) to a dynamically allocated system (to allow arbitrary materials), so it's definitely feasible to take the same approach for soil particulars, since they, like spatters, shouldn't be the kind of thing that has to be checked during CPU-heavy iterating-through-map-tiles stuff.

[Silverionmox]

Having to store information on the soil tiles themselves would be nice, but I'm not sure how much of a memory hog it would be. I'm thinking a minimum of a few bytes per floor tile, so maybe not THAT bad, since it wouldn't really have to be accessed unless things are getting grown or fertilized.

Oh, by the way, you have one of Nikov's quotes marked as mine up there.

Heh, I knew something went wrong.

Given that most of the variables are standardized in the 0-7 range, that's under control. Let's see: energy could get large, water takes 4 bits and frees up one bit, soil texture/type is already tracked, soil pH would take 3 or 4 bits, temperature remains to be seen, 3 or 4 bits each for N, P & Minerals. That's 15-19 bits + energy, depending on the maximum we'd want there.
Every organic object would need 9-12 bits + energy as well, but for that price the food/fertilizer/firewood value of any new crop a modder might add will be taken care of.

Indeed, by design, nothing needs to be calculated until the earth is struck or limbs start to fly around.

[lucusLoC]

OK, i read through a lot of this, but i missed other parts, so point out where i am duplicating effort.

i am going to try and address all the issues i have seen (it appears to me that most of them repeat) in one comprehensive farming post. we will see how well it works.

here are the issues and resolutions as i would like to see it.

assumption: dorfs only eat 8 times a year and drink 18 times a year. any farming considerations will have to take this into account. toady has already stated that he does not wish to increase this, so end numbers will have to reflect this.

1. a dorf requires roughly 10 squares of land per harvest to be feed and boozed. this takes into account crop failures and food loss. (so only 8 tiles if there is no loss)

2. each square of "normal" food takes 1 seed and produces 2 "consumables." this gives you one to eat and one for booze. the consumable is not stacked, but are separate items. this will not be a problem after hauling is revamped, and makes things simpler and more consistent down the production chain. fertilization can increase the yield by 1 consumable per tile, reducing your land use by 1/3rd

a. normal crops take 2 or more seasons to grow, and above ground crops can only be grown in spring and summer, requiring 2 seasons to be fallow. below ground crops are year round, usually taking two seasons or more to grow, but require fertilization with each planting. (this will also benefit from more types of fertilization, but it keeps things balanced, since UG farming will likely require half the space to grow.) with the new partial use system one unit of fertilizer could fertilize 5 plots, or we could just up the output of fertilizer per reaction.

b. to keep farmers busy watering and tending fields will be required, though watering can be automated/eliminated with good farm construction (see suggestions for near water farms and flooding).

c. certain high value crops should implement the space requirement (cardinal point and 9 square, depending on value), as i think it is a good mechanic that should not go to waste. it just means you need more space to grow it.

d. a farmers skill determines failure rate of crops. a regular no prefix farmer should have a failure rate of 2 in 10. a farmer with no skill should have a failure rate of 6 or 7 in 10 (so unsustainable, and thus a cost to train them). legendaries should of course not have a failure (barring outside circumstances of course). as farmers skill up they also work faster, but the speed difference between not farmer and legendary should only be a max of 25%. since the production is not determined on the speed of the farmers anyway this will just mean that a legendary will have more time to work on other stuff, or you will need 25% fewer field laborers if they are all legendary (not unlikely). harvesting and watering are also "hauling" jobs and not give farming xp, only planting and tending do.

3. one consumable makes 2 booze. on booze job requires 5 consumables, for a total of 20 booze per barrel, every time.

4. food processing will always yield a "seed unit" and a processed food unit ("ingredient"). seed units can also be cooked, but require 5 to 20 individual seeds units to make 1 "ingredient" and may require processing before cooking. booze will require 2 units to make one ingredient.

5. cooking food will require 2 to 4 ingredients, and will always yield a stack of 2 to 4. (meat will also have to abide by the no stack rules as well) this will also help mitigate the "one job makes a huge stack of super expensive food" issue).

6. animals will need to be fed, but that should only indirectly consume from the farmland, and should not be fed directly from your crops unless their is not other source of food for them (see the many suggestions on grazing and chunk usage). some indirect sources could be stubble (which should also be harvestable and used as fertilizer) and rotted food.



and now to head off some of the debate (i may be duplicating effort hear. in that case just take this as a long winded "i concur"). 

i do not think 10 tiles per dorf is unreasonable. the starting 7 will need a 10x7 plot to grow food on. that can easily be done with one designation. a 20x100 plot is not actually a great deal of in game space, and can wind up being only 20 individual fields. this issue can be mitigated even further if you allow the field to be expanded beyond 10x10. people who complain about this just don't want it to mess up their current fort designs. i say there is going to be a lot more coming that will cause a lot more problems with that later on. burrows will probably have a greater impact on fort design than this. you can fit farmland for 230 dorfs on one 48x48 embark tile.

if anyone has objection to the "no stack" issue, it will be entirely moot once the hauling is updated. plus it vastly simplifies food handling.

this suggestion also does not address other types of crops such as orchards, wall climbing vines etc. eventually the plan is to get multi z level trees/plants and orchards and vineyards will have to be handled and balanced with that in mind. this is for "farmplot" only crops.

i am sure this as all been talked about before and i just glossed it over, but i wanted to get my thoughts on the matter spelled out clearly.